[ale] What makes a good distro?

[Vernard Martin]

Periodically, someone asks what distro is the best or what is good about distro
X or distro Y.

I have been using RedHat for many years now mainly because it just worked for
what I was doing. In particular it uses the rpm system which I find I like and
Ximian red-carpet would let me keep it up to date in a nice way. However, I'm
not as happy with RedHat as I used to be and I'm about to start reviewing
other distros again.

What I want to know is what things are present in your distro of choice that
really makes you happy? 

The things that I used to like about RedHat was that 
1) I could do an install fairly quickly. Most of the average hardware out there
was auto-detected and just cam up and went. No editing files after the fact to
configure things

2) It was relatively small. Before the days of KDE and GNOME, I could easily
get a nice desktop distro on a 2GB hard drive with a few hundred megabytes to
spare. 

3) There were binary distributions built for it. Yes, I know that I can get a
src rpm and I kow that I can get a tar ball but sometimes for just plain
expediency, I want to just pull down a binary and go. Especially for some
applications where compiling it locally on your machine requires a dozen or so
inter-dependent libraires where some of htem are very unstable. Every tried
compiling evolution for example?

4) It included some really nice apps that were quite useful like ImageMagic and
enscript and ghostview and things like that. These apps aren't part of a
windowing desktop like GNOME or KDE but are very useful. 

5) It followed the SysVr4 standard of where administrative files were places so
that I could use some prior skills that I had to help keep the machine running.
My understanding is that with the exception of BSD, there are no current unices
that follow the format anymore.

V
-- 
Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu) http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/     
        "Anything worth fighting over is worth fighting dirty over"

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